Make Social Playlists out of Turntable.fm, Pitchfork, Hype Machine and More

Put on your headphones. It’s time to listen to music in a new way that might just blow your mind. The above headline doesn’t really do justice to Tomahawk and the new Tomahawklet add-on, which added support for the popular Turntable.fm group-listening service today.

To do this trick, you will first need to install Tomahawk, which is probably a good idea anyway.

Here’s how to work this strange magic for yourself.

First, get Tomahawk, a free, open-source social music player for Mac, Windows, or Linux that lets you create a “Super Collection” consisting of your music and your friends’ music. (Yes, it lets you stream each others’ music, and it’s much easier to set up than it used to be.)

In the Settings Menu that appears automatically, connect your Twitter, Google, and/or Jabber accounts; set your music directory; and connect it to Last.fm if you want to scrobble. If you added a Google account, you can connect to friends by adding their email addresses to Network > Google. As for Twitter, Tomahawk connects you with those friends by sending out a global tweet, or by letting you add one friend at a time by replying or direct messaging them.

Now that you’re part of the Tomahawk generation, get Tomahawklet. This is a mere matter of dragging it into your browser’s bookmark bar. Now, any time you go to Turntable.fm, you can click that bookmark make instant playlists out of whatever is playing in that room, save them in Tomahawk, and play them using Spotify Premium or the “Super Collection” made up of your music collection and your friends’ music collections.

And you can do the same for the track reviews page on Pitchfork (see also: Pitchify), the MP3 blog listings on Hype Machine, your friends’ “mixtapes” on 8tracks, the Billboard and iTunes charts, playlists from Rhapsody and Rdio, and plenty of other web music destinations too.

That’s it. Pretty neat, eh?

Here’s the full list of services from which Tomahawklet can grab social playlists once you have it set up, which takes all of about five minutes: